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Businesses from around the world share the same menial, time-consuming responsibilities and one of these is recruiting the right talent. With so many candidates vying for a position, recruiters need to interview hundreds to thousands of candidates to identify the most suitable staff.

And here comes the recruitment chatbot. Ready to transform the HR and candidate experience, chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that are now increasingly being used to make the hiring process easier.

What is a Chatbot?

A chatbot is a piece of software or computer program that is used by companies and businesses to communicate with people and respond to their questions based on a set of predetermined rules and algorithms. Chatbots aren’t new. However, organizations are now taking advantage of them to improve their workflows while bringing the best results in a short span of time.

What is an HR or Recruiting Chatbot?

In the HR context, chatbots can identify potential candidates based on the data that these candidates provide. Moreover, HR teams that are looking to take their employee engagement to greater heights benefit from a chatbot’s ability to analyze their employees’ current satisfaction levels. HR chatbots can even be used for career coaching and talent development.

How Chatbots Streamline the Recruitment Process and Bring Better Results

During the recruitment or interview process, a chatbot works by analyzing an applicant’s sentences and identifying common patterns to come up with a decision or response. How a chatbot operates is somewhat similar to the way recruiters narrow down prospective employees before they get closer to the final stage of hiring.

Just imagine for a moment: A chatbot reaches out to a recruiter and provides a list of 300 applicants that it has recently interviewed. The recruiter can review these applicants. However, the chatbot also offers a specific list of 10 very good candidates that are worth looking into.

These automated candidate-matching capabilities of chatbots can take the burden of scoring and ranking applicants off a recruiter’s shoulders. Now, recruiters can benefit from having more quality time to converse with outstanding candidates that have been pre-selected by chatbots.

The fact that chatbots operate 24/7 and are designed to talk to multiple applicants at once with high accuracy allows companies to enjoy shorter recruitment cycles. This advantage of speed and precision helps businesses avoid wasting time and money on unqualified talent.

Recruiting Chatbots Improve the Candidate Experience

A lot of candidates have poor experiences when submitting their applications and resumes online. More often than not, they don’t get notified about whether a company they have applied for has received their documents. This uncertainty coupled with the agony of waiting for feedback creates a negative impression on a company’s credibility.

Through the integration of recruiting artificial intelligence, several candidates can be accommodated immediately and notified with the results of their interview once it’s done. This lowers their anxiety and helps them move on to finding opportunities that are better suited for them. Companies that create HR bots are seeking for new ways to improve their functionalities to satisfy the needs of users worldwide.

Job Pal recognizes the need for companies to start engaging candidates the moment they apply for a job role. With that, they have built AI-powered chatbots to automate the communication between employers and candidates thus speeding up the hiring process.

Luc Dudler, CEO of Job Pal, talks about their plans for the future: “2017 is for as all around bringing our core intelligence to the next level and during this phase we’re working very closely with our customers. In 2018 we’ll ship the first version of a recruiting assistant that customers can completely customize themselves and enable companies to automate even more steps of their hiring process.”

Do HR Chatbots in Recruiting Pretend to Be Human?

The answer is no. Although today’s chatbots automate the hiring process and are designed to interact like humans, they aren’t even close to being one. An article on CNET mentions that bot creators must never assume that they can become more than just software tools.

Transparency breeds trust. Businesses that invest in chatbots for recruiting need to disclose the fact that they are using these AI tools to provide programmed responses. Being upfront about their use prevents unmet expectations and mistrust from happening. In fact, when transparency is maintained, candidates are more than willing to discuss with chatbots about future job opportunities and inquire about potential employers.

AI Chatbots provide immense value when it comes to qualifying candidates but will never be able to replace real HR interaction. Chatbots are incapable of providing answers other than their programmed knowledge.

The Future of Recruiting with HR Chatbots

Businesses have a bright future with the use of AI. One can look at chatbots as automated virtual assistants that can effectively take care of repetitive HR tasks but not take the place of recruiters who are much capable of handling the human side of recruitment. This means that chatbots are meant to augment, and not to replace.

Joseph Sogbaike is a freelance HR content writer with over 4 years experience in the HR industry. He helps businesses create web content that engages their audience and attracts new clients. Connect with Joseph on his websitewww.hrblogwriter.com or on Twitter @gbengasogbaike.